Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  Chris Harven was more stoner than seeker, a burnout rather than a believer. By his own admission, he had always been a real troublemaker, but not maliciously so. While Smith was getting his varsity letters every year and editing the school newspaper, Harven was getting sent to detention, where he often caused so much commotion that they threw him out of there too. George volunteered and served two years with distinction in the U.S. Army, whereas Harven had been drafted and got himself thrown out in two months on an SPN-264—“Unsuitability, Character and Behavioral Disorders”—by simply refusing to do anything he was told. Upon discharge, George received a certificate of gratitude for his service, while Chris, on the other hand, received these parting words from his commander: “I’ve been serving in the military for over thirty years and the best thing I ever did for the U.S. Army was get rid of you, Harven.”

  Still, the two young men found common ground in things they both loved: camping, guns, music, and marijuana. Harven had a strong interest in survivalism but was less clear on exactly what he would need to survive. Smith knew what he would need to survive but not exactly how to survive it. So they talked about guns, bomb shelters, Jesus, and the end of the world while shoveling dirt, planting oleander, and mowing lawns, sneaking off every few hours to get stoned.

  Chris left Cypress for something a bit closer to home, signing on with the city of Fountain Valley Parks Department in 1976. He was surprised that George had not followed. The supervisor at Cypress, Chuck Morad, did not like George one bit, and thought him an anarchist and troublemaker. He warned other employees, just as he had Harven years before, not to listen to all of George’s talk about the Second Coming, overthrowing the government, and “killing pigs” if he had to. “That guy’s going to lead you into nothing but trouble one day, Chris,” Morad had said.

  But by April 1980, Smith and Harven had been fired; both pulling in unemployment checks and doing day labor jobs when they could find them. Harven was bringing in some steady cash from selling pot, but the money was running out for George. He was starting to sound desperate.

  Harven wandered into the greenhouse next to the pit to check on the crop of marijuana plants. He pinched off a small green bud from one of the immature plants, crushing it between his thumb and finger and giving it a sniff, and then tossing it aside. The shit wouldn’t be ready to sell for months. He walked out to the backyard. Unlike the carefully groomed plants in the greenhouse, the backyard of the house that the two men owned on 50th Street in Mira Loma was neglected and overgrown with weeds and withering fruit trees. Harven and Smith had scraped together a $5,000 down payment and bought it in the spring of 1979 for $56,000 with a 10 percent VA mortgage in George’s name. It was a ratty-looking, stucco, ranch-style affair with three bedrooms.

  Shielding the sun from his eyes, Harven looked up at George standing on a ladder, uncoiling concertina razor wire across the top of the greenhouse. It’s gonna be at least three months on that bud.

  We don’t have three months, said George. We’ll lose the house by then. Now twenty-seven, George Smith was a little over a year younger than Harven, an inch shorter, and ten pounds lighter. They had the same sort of build: thick around the arms, chest, and shoulders, thin at the waist. Smith made his way down the ladder and removed his gloves. You know what the solution is, he said. You just need to stop being such a chickenshit about it.

  The accusation cut at Harven. He cared what Smith thought of him, a fact that Smith was more than happy to manipulate. There’s just a lot of shit that could go wrong, Harven said.

  Like what?

  Harven shrugged. I’m thinking about it, he said, turning away. He wasn’t in the mood for getting into that whole bank robbery thing right then. He surveyed the work they had put into the backyard. The entire perimeter of the property was secured now. They had raised the height of the walls separating them from their immediate neighbors by adding three feet of corrugated fiberglass to the top of the cinder block. Razor wire was strung along the fencing, and hundreds of carpet tacks hammered in with the sharp ends sticking up through the wood on top. Harven inspected a cluster of tacks, running his finger over the sharp tips. They rusted up pretty good, he called to Smith.

  Sure did, Smith said. Fuck up your hands and give you tetanus too, climbing over that.

  The carpet tacks and barbed wire had been Harven’s idea, partly to keep the neighbor kids from stealing their weed. The pit was George’s brainchild, designed as an escape tunnel leading from the garage to the backyard if the cops ever came busting in. But both had another use, something much bigger than protecting a greenhouse full of pot. The pit would be stocked with food and water to serve as a bunker when the A-bombs started to fall. The perimeter fortifications would help them hold off the bands of marauders who would come after their supplies. For any who managed to breach the perimeter, well, Chris and George had plenty of firepower to take care of them.

  The two young men might have had varying visions of how it would all go down, but their beliefs led to the same place: a catastrophic event followed by social collapse, anarchy, and a fight for survival in a nightmarish, postapocalyptic landscape.

  George was still a book of Revelation guy, always on the lookout for current events he could match up with biblical prophecy. For Smith, the sins of man would bring about the wrath of God. Conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land, the Iranian hostage crisis now in its sixth month, the ritualistic murder-suicide of more than nine hundred people in Jonestown eighteen months before . . . George could see it all coming together, the chaos before the collapse, all of it foretold in the Bible, provided one knew how to read the signs.

  In his 1978 book, End Times, Pastor Chuck Smith had finally revealed Calvary Chapel’s official deadline for the Rapture. Borrowing heavily from Hal Lindsey’s 1970 Christian End Times crossover bestseller, The Late Great Planet Earth, the pastor used a creative interpretation of Jesus’s “Parable of the Budding Fig Tree” to predict the timing of the Second Coming of Jesus.

  If I understand Scripture correctly, Jesus taught us that the generation which sees the “budding of the fig tree,” the birth of the nation of Israel, will be the generation that sees the Lord’s return. I believe that the generation of 1948 is the last generation. Since a generation of judgment is forty years and the Tribulation period lasts seven years, I believe the Lord could come back for His Church any time before the Tribulation starts, which would mean any time before 1981. (1948 + 40 - 7 = 1981).

  With Pastor Chuck Smith’s prophecy, George Smith knew he had, at most, eight months to prepare.

  Chris Harven could buy into all that End Times stuff, at least enough to add it to his list of doomsday scenarios that included nuclear war, asteroid strikes, population explosions, and any number of ecological disasters bandied about over the last decade. But Chris had recently settled on a specific theory of how the great catastrophe would come about, one he saw as far more pragmatic than the mystical prophecies of some Orange County preacher. There was even a name for it: “the Jupiter Effect.”

  Published in 1974, The Jupiter Effect was a sensational bestseller by British astrophysicists John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann. The two scientists argued an approaching rare alignment of all nine planets on the same side of the sun would cause an increase in solar activity, altering the Earth’s rotation, causing massive tidal shifts, and exerting immense pressure on the world’s tectonic plates. The resulting geological instability would produce enormous volcanic eruptions throughout the Pacific Ranges and a massive earthquake that would tear California lengthwise up the San Andreas Fault. The date for all this havoc? March 10, 1982.

  CHRIS WENT INSIDE THE HOUSE AND SLIPPED ON A SHOULDER HOLSTER CONTAINING the Browning .45 semiautomatic pistol he had bought a few months back. He was hoping his unemployment check had arrived, but he no longer went to the mailbox at the end of the driveway unarmed. The sight of armed men going out to fetch the mail confused the neighbors, a few of whom assumed they were a pair of c
ops who’d moved in the previous spring. Who else would walk thirty feet to a mailbox packing heat?

  Guns were not an unusual sight in Mira Loma. Despite its proximity to Los Angeles, Mira Loma had maintained a rural mentality that extended to gun ownership. Sandwiched between Norco to the south and San Bernardino County to the north, Mira Loma was a scruffy, eight-square-mile island of residential housing surrounded by empty lots, arid farmland, smelly chicken ranches, and pastures of grazing sheep. It was not a city at all, but merely an unincorporated area of Riverside County policed by the Riverside Sheriff’s Department and underserved and underfunded by county government.

  Originally called Wineville, the area’s name was changed in 1930 by local real estate developers following the notoriously grisly Wineville chicken coop murders that gained national attention in the late 1920s. A chicken rancher named Gordon Northcott had a short but prolific run abducting, raping, torturing, and murdering up to twenty young boys, burning some body parts in a backyard fire pit and scattering the rest across Riverside County. Northcott was convicted and hanged at age twenty-three for four of the murders, including that of an unidentified, decapitated Latino boy referred to in the tabloids of the era as “the Headless Mexican.”

  Still, the area could not entirely shed the memory of the American Gothic–style murders, and the neighborhood never rose above the low end of working class. By the 1970s, the community had become a mix of Latino and white homeowners and renters. Housing was cheap and consisted of single-family homes of random design and constructed with a mishmash of building materials. Mira Loma became the land that Building & Zoning forgot with a multitude of non-permitted, do-it-yourself additions haphazardly tacked on without regard to quality, codes, or aesthetics. Maintenance standards of both houses and yards were spotty at best. And in an era of rising crime rates and a lousy economy, it had its fair share of unemployment, poverty, drug dealing, alcoholism, domestic violence, home break-ins, fistfights, and an occasional murder.

  Harven opened the mailbox and stood leafing through the collection of junk mail, grocery store discount flyers, and utility bills. In the driveway next door, their neighbor, Denise Sparrow, was lifting a bag of groceries out of her trunk. She paused on the way to her front door. “Boy, you guys must have a whole bunch of gold in there or something,” she called over to Harven with a friendly smile, motioning with her head toward the fortified perimeter of the property.

  Chris had never met the woman nor any of his other neighbors. He and George avoided them whenever possible, even when they walked over to make conversation. Most had given up trying altogether. Harven flipped the door to the mailbox closed and looked over at the woman. Yeah, he said flatly, turning and walking back to the house.

  “How’s the little one doing? I haven’t seen him around lately,” Sparrow tried again in a cheerful voice. Harven ignored her entirely.

  The little one was Harven’s five-year-old son Timmy. Harven’s wife Lani had taken the kid and left Chris two months earlier. The marriage had gone the way of most marriages between a nineteen-year-old boy and a seventeen-year-old girl. Chris had been the crazy high school boyfriend, always in trouble at school, never without money from selling weed. They rode around in Chris’s car, got stoned, hung out with friends, went to rock concerts at the San Bernardino Swing Auditorium where Chris always got the best tickets. But when Timmy came along, Chris did not adapt well to the required change in lifestyle. By 1979, he was still smoking a lot of dope, zipping around in a Camaro Z/28, and involved in a secret relationship with a single mother named Nancy Bitetti, a respiratory therapist he met at the Broadway department store.

  In February 1980, Lani had finally had enough of Chris’s nonsense and was sick of living in a shithole with his weird friend George. So she took off. It was the start of a bad run. In March 1980 he lost his job along with all the benefits of a municipal worker. An argument on Easter Sunday damaged the relationship with Bitetti, but they limped on anyhow. Now he was laying carpet part-time for lousy pay and no benefits and falling behind on house and car payments. Lani seemed to be limiting his access to Timmy. Chris told his mother he felt like his life was going down the tubes.

  When Chris returned to the house, George was sitting at the kitchen table, dirty, sweaty, and chugging a glass of tap water. From somewhere in a back bedroom, a radio tuned to KMET blasted a Foghat guitar solo. Chris tossed the junk mail in the trash. He opened a letter from the mortgage company and then slid the envelope across the table.

  George read the letter for all of two seconds before sliding it back. We’re fucked if we lose this house.

  I know it, Chris said, pulling the holster Lani had bought for him for Christmas over his head. He hung it on the back of a chair and scooped up the keys to his Z/28.

  Where are you going? Smith asked.

  Drop off some Thai sticks for my brother to sell.

  Hope he sells it before he smokes it all, George said doubtfully. Russell Harven was a world-class pothead, even by Harven family standards.

  He knows I’ll kick his ass if he does, Harven said, walking to the sink to take a long drink of water straight from the tap.

  You gonna talk to him? George said.

  Harven flipped off the tap and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Fuck no. I don’t want that little shit involved in something like this.

  He already is, George said. Manny asked him yesterday.

  HEY, FUCKFACE, HOW DID YOU LET MANNY DELGADO TALK YOU INTO ROBBING a bank?

  Thirty miles due east of Norco, Russell Harven was not preparing for the Apocalypse or anything else. He was doing what he usually did: nothing. At twenty-six, a typical day for Russ consisted of lying around in his room smoking dope and jacking off to the Playboy centerfolds that papered the walls of the little bedroom in his parents’ house in Anaheim.

  Russ looked up from the acrylic bong and stared glassy-eyed at his older brother standing in the doorway. He let out an enormous cloud of pot smoke. He said it was your fuckin’ idea.

  It’s George’s plan, not mine, Chris said, tossing a baggie of Thai sticks onto the bed.

  Russ lifted the baggie and studied the marijuana inside. He looked a lot like his brother, but an inch shorter and thirty pounds lighter. Same blue eyes, same natural squint, same sandy brown hair. But unlike his brother, Russ’s hair was long and stringy and, like the rest of him, unwashed. A scraggly billy-goat beard now extended four inches below his chin. His body odor was detectable even through the pot smoke that constantly hung in the air. I didn’t tell him I’d do it for sure, Russ said. Just that I’d think about it.

  Chris plopped down into the only chair in the room and reached out for the bong. Here, give me that, he said. He loaded the bowl with a bud of Russ’s shitty Colombian, flicked a Bic lighter, and the water pipe bubbled ferociously, filling with smoke. Chris took his finger off the carburetor hole and sucked it in deeply.

  So, what’s the plan, anyhow? Russ said, watching Chris exhale the smoke up toward the ceiling. I don’t want to get into anything fucked-up.

  Chris bullet-pointed what he knew, leaving out most of the details. Russ was not a detail guy anyhow. They’d rob the bank on a Friday, in and out in two minutes max, pick up cold getaway cars a mile away, and take off to Vegas to change out the hot bills through the casinos.

  That sounds pretty good, Russ said absently, opening the baggie of Thai sticks. I guess I’ll do it.

  It was just like Russell Harven not to ask too many questions, to just go along with something because somebody suggested it. Life seemed to wash over Russ without his direct participation. He wasn’t stupid, he was just leading a numbed existence, not even motivated enough to think through a decision like whether or not to rob a bank. He exhibited a profound failure to connect his actions with their logical consequences. At age eleven, he was diagnosed with diabetes, requiring daily insulin injections, usually administered by his protective mother, Mae. Russ’s attitude toward the disease ranged anyw
here from fatalistic to flippant. He subsisted on a steady diet of candy bars and RC Cola despite maintaining the belief that the disease might kill him before he reached thirty.

  Other than an arrest for trespassing on school property, Russ had no criminal record until he was twenty years old and got popped for possession of amphetamines with intent to sell. It wasn’t hard drugs, just a bunch of “whites,” the same weak cross-tops long-haul truckers eat like candy to stay awake behind the wheel. Although barely stronger than caffeine pills, whites were a Schedule II controlled substance right along with the likes of cocaine, methadone, and PCP. And Russ had thousands on him. He was lucky to get off with a sentence of four months in the Orange County Jail.

  Russ was married at the time, but just like Rosie Miranda had done to George Smith when he shipped off to Germany, Russ’s young wife took the opportunity of his jailhouse absence to run off with another boy. When Russ got out of the slammer, he was crushed to find his wife and son living with another man. But Russ never fought all that hard to get her back. They never got around to getting a divorce, and Russ continued to wear his wedding band even after Eileen had a second baby with her new man.

  Russ picked up a Thai stick and sniffed the length of it. It was strong, real Southeast Asian cannabis sativa tightly wrapped with a thread of hemp around a short bamboo stick. Crystals of pure THC glistened on the surface. He unwrapped the end of one of the sticks and loaded another hit in the bowl.

  You smoke that, you pay for it, Chris threatened.